Great Throughts Treasury

"Simply having children does not make mothers." - John Augustus Shedd

"We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children also educate us?" - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

"Whatever you would have your children become, strive to exhibit in your own lives and conversation." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

"The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be." - O. Carl Simonton

"As a man grows older, he values the voice of experience more and the voice of prophecy less. He finds more of life's wealth in the common pleasures - home, health, children. He thinks more about worth of men and less about their wealth. He boasts less and boosts more. He hurries less, and usually makes more progress. He esteems the friendship of God a little higher." - Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist

"Of all the sights which can soften and humanize the heart of men, there is none that ought so surely to reach it as that of innocent children, enjoying the happiness which is their proper and natural portion." - Robert Southey

"With regard to marriage, it is plain that it is in accordance with reason, if the desire of connection is engendered not merely by external form, but by a love of begetting children and wisely educating them; and if, in addition, the love both of the husband and wife has for its cause not external form merely, but chiefly liberty of mind." -

"Man is a spiritual being in that - unless he is badly corrupted - he responds powerfully to non-material stimuli: the beauty in nature or in art, the trust of children, the needs of helpless people, the death of a friend even though long absent." -

"Children should be surrounded with the things of nature which have their own educational value. Their minds should be allowed to stumble upon and be surprised at everything that happens in today’s life; the new tomorrow will stimulate their attention with new facts of life." -

"Our nature is obscured by work done by the compulsion of want or fear. The mother reveals herself in the service of her children, so our true freedom is not the freedom from action but freedom in action, which can only be attained in the work of love." -

"The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man’s most cruel and wasteful mistakes." -

"When we accept any discipline for ourselves, we try to avoid everything except that which is necessary for our purpose; it is this purposefulness, which belongs to the adult mind, that we force upon school children. We say, “Never keep your mind alert, attend to what is before you, what has been given you.” This tortures the child because it contradicts nature’s purpose, and nature, the greatest of all teachers, is thwarted at every step by the human teacher who believes in machine-made lessons rather than life lessons, so that the growth of the child’s mind is not only injured, but forcibly spoiled." -

"Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion." -

"For he who has acquired the habit of lying or deceiving his father, will do the same with less remorse to others. I believe that it is better to bind your children to you by a feeling of respect, and by gentleness, then by fear." -

"What is the meaning of life? The meaning may not be expressed in words. It transcends the mind and the intellect. The meaning is to be experienced, realized... It is open to everyone who would live according to certain disciplines... The discipline of duty. Life is a field of duty, not a dance of desires... The discipline of service... We are here to help others... The opposite of love is not hate but apathy... The discipline of silence... The meaning of life is to love God and to give the service of love to the suffering children of God. And to the birds and animals who are God’s children as well." - Dada Vaswani, born Jashan Pahalraj Vaswani

"Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society." - Daniel Webster

"There are no illegitimate children - only illegitimate parents." -

"What is the grossest form of neglect? If a man does not... devote every effort toward the education of his children." - Apocrypha NULL

"The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models." -

"We should never victimize as we do, children whose only crime is color." -

"Praise is especially destructive to children, for they readily grasp the fact that praise is based on identification with their actions. Thus, they automatically blame themselves every time they make a mistake. This is the beginning of their lack of Self-Esteem." - L. S. Barksdale

"When we come to die, we shall be alone. From our worldly possessions we shall be about to part. Worldly friends - the friends drawn to us by our position, our wealth, or our social qualities, will leave us as we enter the dark valley. From those bound to us by stronger ties - our kindred, our loved ones, children, brothers, sister, and from those not less dear to us who have been made our friends because they and we are the friends of the same Savior - from them also we must part. Yet not all will leave us. There is One who “sticketh closer than a brother” - One who having loved His own which are in the world loves them to the end." - Albert Barnes

"How then do you pour a little bit of what you feel and think and know into another’s mind?... To help children visualize, to convince them, the teachers use maps, charts, diagrams, they write words on the board, they gesture, admonish, orate. Hence the fatigue and hence the rule that good teaching is a matter of basal metabolism. Some teachers have the facts but not the phosphorescence of learning." -

"The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day." - Orlando A. Battistam, fully Orlando Aloysius Battista, aka O.A. Battista

"Be more prudent for your children than perhaps you have been for yourself. When they, too, are parents they will imitate you, and each of you will have prepared happy generations who will transmit, together with your memory, the worship of your wisdom." - Edmond La Beaume Cherbonnier

"Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communication coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones they see on the screen, and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The “TV child”... gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him.... If, later in life, this block of solid inertia is not removed, the emotional isolation from others that starts in front of TV may continue... This being seduced into passivity and discouraged about facing life actively on one’ sown is the real danger of TV." - Bruno Bettelheim

"We want our children to believe that, inherently, all men are good. But children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be." - Bruno Bettelheim

"Governments which suppress freedom of speech... act like children who shut their eyes in order not to be seen." - Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne

"Love means that the adults be genuinely concerned with the evolution of the true nature of the child. Children are not able to respond to a love which tries to fashion them according to the concept of the adult, no matter how good the latter's intention may be." - Gotthard Booth

"Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"We may learn from children how large a part of our grievances is imaginary. But the pain is just as real." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a congenial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into congenial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers." - John Christian Bovee

"There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen

"Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow - the wholesome warmth necessary to make the heart-blood circulate healthily and freely; unhappiness - the chilling pressure which produces here an inflammation, there an excrescence and worst, of all, "the mind's green and yellow sickness" - ill temper." -

"When children know uniqueness is respected, they are more likely to put theirs to use." - Dorothy Corkille Briggs

"If it were possible for children to develop without any interference from the outside world, no special stimulation for their creative work would be necessary. Every child would use his deeply rooted creative impulses without inhibition, confident." - W. Lambert Brittain, fully William Lambert Brittain

"There are other similarities between poetry and children's speech. Poets tend to look for significant evocative detail --something straight out of life -- to carry their meaning, and to avoid the vaguely general or abstract terms. With young children it is not a matter of choice. Their ideas must take a concrete form of expression because they have not mastered the art of masking and handling (Sign-mind) abstraction. A five year old boy in an infants' class once said, "Oh, yes, I know Geography. Its polar bears at the top and penguins at the bottom."" -

"While men believe in the possibilities of children being religious, they are largely failing to make them so, because they are offering them not a child's but a man's religion - men's forms of truth and men's forms of experience." - Phillips Brooks

"Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future." - Jean de La Bruyère

"Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us; they rejoice in the present." - Jean de La Bruyère

"The cloud which appeared to the prophet Ezekiel carried with it winds and storms, but it was environed with a golden circle, to teach us that the storms of afflictions, which happen to God’s children, are encompassed with brightness and smiling felicity." - Nicolas Caussin

"Women make us poets, children make us philosophers." -

"Nature is exhaustessly reproductive... Mother Earth cares for her children. The landscape of the farm is full of divine feeling and rich in suggestion that inspire calm and quicken industry. It throbs with the tender heart of God. It is alive. In its simple and steady processes it reveals the Father’s care for His children." -

"Just as we can dig a channel to control the direction of a stream, we can control the direction of our children's activities through praise and recognition." - Natalie Cole

"People sometimes refer to higher education as the higher learning, but colleges and universities are much more than the knowledge factories; they are testaments to man's perennial struggle to make a better world for himself, his children, and his children's children. This, indeed, is their sovereign purpose. They are great fortifications against ignorance and irrationality; but they are more than places of higher learning - they are centers and symbols of man's higher yearning." - William H. Cowley

"Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves." - Marcelene Cox

"Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt." - Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow

"The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the... ecological chain of birthing, growing and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children." - Midge Decter, fully Midge Rosenthal Decter

"Children are notoriously curious about everything - everything except - the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything." - Floyd Dell